IceChat IRC Client

Welcome to the IceChat Web site. IceChat is a popular IRC (Internet Relay Chat) Client that can be used in Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista and also Windows 7. It has been tested on 64bit versions of XP, Vista and Windows 7 as well. IceChat 7.70 has been known to have problems with Windows 8. If you are running Windows 8, it is suggested you try out IceChat 9.

IceChat is a very user friendly program that can be setup in a matter of a minutes. IceChat is capable of connecting to multiple servers and channels all at once, with ease, so you can easily chat with your friends in your favorite channels.

For those people that wish to do more then just chat with IceChat, there are numerous different ways to customize the look and feel of IceChat. It starts with simply changing a theme, to writing your own scripts and making your own custom popups, using the IceChat Editor. The built-in VBS (Visual Basic Scripting) script engine is powerful and can be made to do just about anything, and even allowing users to create their own activeX dll's for advanced scripting solutions.

IceChat has some unique features that set it apart from other similar programs. Most users truly enjoy the built in Emoticons. But for those select few that do not, this feature can be disabled. The Favorite Server Tree is truly fantastic, and because IceChat is built around its multi-server capabilities, it is an essential part of IceChat that makes it that much easier to use.

IceChat was first being developed in 2000, and has gone through many changes in its interface, design, and of course its many features. It is currently in the stage of a total re-write and a Release Candidate version was made available in early 2011. As of today, we are very close to releasing IceChat 9, bringing it out of the Release Candidate(Beta) stage. More testing is still required.

IceChat is FreeWare, meaning anyone can use it, at no cost.

The main IceChat Support channel is located on Quakenet (irc.quakenet.org) in the #icechat channel. The IceChat 9 Support channel is located on Freenode in the #icechat channel.

This web site was started November 11, 2003.

IceChat 7 Changelog -- A list of all the updates for the IceChat 7 life cycle

RC6.5 has been released, a minor update for fixing ping replies and allowing to still use the editbox when having settings/options windows open.

One of the main issues haunting the project is the control for displaying the console/channel/query text. It has been a custom control, but mainly the problems lie with the framework not properly rendering and measuring text, so the text selection has just been a nightmare. This is even more so a problem with bold text. We may very well just switch to an Extended Richtext Control, which will of course require more testing and debugging, on its own.

RC6.3 has been released, with some fixes for plugins, and users not be able to connect to Hybrid servers.

There were also reported many problems with the IceChat Updater, so some changes were made for this as well. The updater should start working better after the 6.3 update, but a manual update will need to be applied for now.

RC6.1 has been released, with a minor fix.

There were some reports that an error box showed on startup, so this is a minor update to fix this problem.

RC6 has been released, with more minor fixes and updates.

This brings us another step closer to releasing a non-beta version of IceChat 9. More plugins are in development as well, and script plugin to allow use of older icechat7 vbs type scripts is in development as well. We have also added more ircv3 compatability to this release. Thank you again to all our users.

RC4 has been released, adding more stability and bug fixes from RC3.

The channel bar has returned, but the tabs are not currently draggable, until a fix is found.

Plugin functionality has been enhanced as well, so look to see more IceChat 9 Plugins added to the downloads section.

RC3 has been released, with many updates and fixes from RC2.

There are some major changes to RC3, mainly that the channel bar is now gone.

There is now a Theme Importer to import color themes from IceChat 7, and you can also on initial install, import the majority of your IceChat 7 settings. Not every setting could be imported, just the majority of them.

RC2 has been released, with many updates and fixed from RC1. The plugin framework has finally reached a stage of stability, and more plugins can finally be made.

Because if the major changes to the plugin engine, no actual update will be available internally to IceChat 9, the full install will need to be downloaded to update to this version. Further releases should not have this problem.

We would like to thank everyone for submitting any bug reports and testing out RC1 to help make RC2 more stable.

Stayed tuned for Plugin Additions, and thank you all again, for trying out IceChat 9.

IceChat 9, formally known as IceChat 2009, has released its first truly stable releas, as release candidate 1.

There have been huge improvements to the plugin engine, and that is still currently being refined. The next few upcoming versions should have the core of the plugin engine completed. The plugins folder has been moved from the AppData folder to the Program Files\IceChat\Plugins folder to allow unloading and reloading of plugins on the fly.

To download IceChat 9 RC1, click on the Downloads button on the top menu, and select the IceChat 9 section.

Some more minor fixes added for the Nick list, where it was losing host’s at times.
Also, channel modes should behave better now on some networks.
Other then those 2 main fixes, just some minor updates for stability.

IceChat 2009 Beta 5.2 was released with mainly changes to the Plugin Engine. This will allow for greater flexibility to the Plugin Engine. We should start seeing more Plugins created for IceChat 2009, and a download section will be added to the website for Plugins.